HOW ANNOYING AM I? PART II

Unrelated announcement: Check out my Home Goes Strong article Thinking About a Valentine Dinner? How About Red, Pink, White . . . & Wine With a Heart?Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (A la Mie (Im Restaurant La Mie)) Art Poster Print

In How Annoying Am I Part I, I outlined how annoying I am to my daughters. After posting that, I observed another annoying pattern in myself: the failure to absorb details my daughter tells me.

So when I ask, what are you doing this weekend, I get, “You asked me that yesterday!” (Needless-to-mention subtext: You are sooo annoying!)

As I mentioned in my Restaurant Rant I am also annoying in restaurants both to waitpersons and, consequently, to my companion/s (skip to next paragraph if you read my RR): lots of extra lemon, this and that on the side, tastes of two wines before deciding, a glass of ice for dumping into the white wine I finally decide on, no added salt, steak medium rare but more on the rare side, the 1-5 scale of doneness being a bit too general.

The waitperson gets a nice tip for putting up with this, but what about my friend/s?

Daniel, a frequent dinner companion, grudgingly puts up with this and softens my request barrage by distracting the waitperson with his own annoying habit of excessive friendliness, guessing correctly, for example, that the waitperson’s accent is Uruguayan. He then pinpoints the exact region in Uruguay the waitperson hails from, a regular Henry Higgins he is, my pal Dan. After that he comes up with a phrase in the waiterperson’s language. He has such a phrase for every country from Korea to Kazakhstan, Lithuania to Liberia.

Vintage FRENCH "Absinthe Pernot" Man and Girl at the BAR LIQUOR Poster by Leonetto CappielloI find the schmoozing charming, as long as it’s limited. But often the restaurant is packed and I’m on edge, noticing the waitperson has other tables to serve. Before disengaging, Daniel intuits, again correctly, that the waitperson is going for a graduate degree in Philosophy at George Washington University.

Now that I’m thinking how annoying Daniel is, I feel less annoying by contrast.

What about your friends annoys you?

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